The common credit card provides some data storage. Most people carry some of these in their wallets. The magnetic stripe on the back of the card, just above the signature panel, has three tracks that contain recorded information. The three tracks store 553 bits, 200 bits and 535 bits. To complete a purchase using a credit card, information from the tracks is read as the card is swiped through a reader mechanism. The purchase price is credited or debited against the recorded user's account and banking information. Certain cards such as identification, driver license, library, and loyalty cards encode information in these tracks to enable owner identification and the delivery of services.
One class of credit cards known as smart cards contain an integrated circuit (IC) with as much as a megabyte (MB) of electrically erasable and programmable memory. Some of these cards use an 8 pad connector to exchange information with a special reader when the card is installed in this mechanism. These cards typically conform to international standard ISO 7816 and communicate at data speeds of about 115 kilobits per second.
Another class of IC cards use a coil embedded in the card to exchange information using the 13.56 MHz frequency band with a special reader. These are known as “non-contact” cards. The cards obtain electric power from the reader as magnetic radiation, and the coil in the card converts this to current to power the electronic circuits in the card. An example of this type of card is the MIFARE card. These cards conform to international standard ISO/IEC 14443 and for the exchange of information to occur reliably must operate at a distance of less than about 10 centimeters from the reader. The data exchange rate is about 106 kilobits per second.
Another class of proximity cards conforming to ISO/IEC 15693 operates at larger distances, up to about 1.5 meters. The strength of the magnetic field at these distances, however, is much smaller, reducing the data transfer rate. The result is that only small amounts of information can be exchanged during a transaction. All of these smart cards require a reader to be installed at the point where a financial transaction is made or a service delivered.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,526,555 teaches a method to authenticate a user employing a Bluetooth transceiver embedded in a Smart Card such that the user's files are printed at a specific station. The art described in this document does not teach methods to incorporate a high capacity data storage memory module in the card or power management to allow large amounts of data to be transmitted during the execution of a transaction.
A paper titled “Integrating Bluetooth, Biometrics and Smartcards for Personal Identification and Verification,” authored by Vivek Jain and Ramesh C. Joshi was presented at the Proceedings of National Symposium on Emerging Trends In Networking and Mobile Communication, Chandigarh, India, Sep. 5-6, 2003. This document describes a card that contains 32 kilobytes of data storage with a Bluetooth integrated circuit and a thin battery embedded in the card. The document does not teach a large data capacity storage module or power management. Nor does it provide an independent means for maintaining integrity and authenticity of stored information.